Editors’ Blog

Over the weekend, Democrats or Dem-adjacent persons watching polling of the 2024 presidential election got knocked over the head with a metaphorical anvil: a batch of polls collectively showing Joe Biden 2 to 4 points behind Donald Trump. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about these polls and polling generally, ranging from the technical, to the what does it mean, to please talk me off the ledge. So I wanted to try to address them here.

First: Are these polls accurate? In an age when no one answers their cell phones let alone landlines, how do we know whether these polls are representative. Who has a landline? etc.

This is a complicated question. Without getting into deep technical details, yes, the pollsters definitely get that landlines are old news and most people don’t even answer unknown numbers on their cell phones. The same applies to text requests for political surveys. Response rates — or, rather, non-response rates — are awful. But pollsters know all of that and they’ve come up with pretty smart ways to deal with it. Without getting too far into the weeds, it comes down to increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling the electorate, using those models to weight the results, and in so doing backing out a representative sample from the data.

Living in 2024, one of the big questions we have to ask ourselves is: why aren’t there flying cars? And where’s our colony on Mars? If I wanted to break the moment of levity I could ask: why do people still die of cancer? There’s actually a whole debate about whether and why the pace of invention — or, relatedly, scientific breakthroughs — has slowed compared to the first half of the 20^th century. But let me not get ahead of myself. 

These questions occurred me because I’ve been working on a project that requires some research on family history. And yesterday as I was putting my iPhone in a locker at my gym, this occurred to me: how would I explain the iPhone to my mother, who died in 1981?

When I thought of this I was thinking about photos and social media and a third, really big thing that is made up of many other, little things — not huge individually but vast and ubiquitous taken together — that we do with this small device. What analogues would I use to explain it?

In my post yesterday, I said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has reached a point of diminishing returns, even on its own terms, and that the U.S. needs to help Israel, even in spite of itself or at least in spite of the current government, to bring it to a halt. A friend of mine got in touch with me and asked basically, how precisely can the U.S. do that? He meant this not in a challenging way but literally, what power does the U.S. have to make this happen? This led to an interchange that helped me think through why the U.S. has been doing what it has been doing, what it can do and what it can’t.

First, why is the U.S. sending arms and munitions to Israel at all? Israel has an incredibly powerful military and huge stockpiles of weapons of all sorts. Set aside the policy or moral questions. Why is it even necessary? At the very beginning of the conflict the U.S. provided fulsome support and arms in part simply to signal support, that the U.S. was backing Israel to the hilt after October 7th. But beneath that messaging and symbolism there was something much more concrete.

Mitch McConnell is one of those perhaps historic figures for whom the greatness of his skill and impact are matched only in inverse by the malignity of his impact on our politics. To put it more brashly, McConnell was great at doing political evil. There is now a kind of rearguard effort to remake McConnell as an institutionalist, a last vestige of the pre-Trumpian GOP. And on that last point, being a vestige, there’s some truth. On being an institutionalist, not at all.

Mitch McConnell’s great legacy is the thorough institutionalization of minority rule in U.S. politics, especially at the federal level. The first and most obvious part of that is that McConnell, more than anyone else, is the man who broke the United States Senate, largely by domesticating the filibuster. No more a wild bull kept out in the stockade for ugly moments but now living within the household, almost a family member, though no less dangerous and wild.